Thermaltake MaxOrb Cooler

A side view of the fin array shelf and part of the mounting assembly.  The arm you see resting on the base works in unison with included mounting hardware specific to your mainboard, to create one of the nicer mounting systems I've ever seen.  More on that in a few.

Flipping things over we find the MaxOrb's base.  The construction to the MaxOrb can fool you with its silver coloring throughout.  The base and heatpipes are actually copper with only the fins being aluminum.  The base surface was smooth to the touch and showed to be of admirable quality in the famous "reflection test" which does not guarantee a perfectly flush surface but its a pretty good indication.

Strap it on and plug it in!

The mounting hardware does have a central piece called not surprisingly the 'universal' retention frame.  This frame mounts onto your mainboard using the other appropriate parts so that the cooler's clip we saw will hook under one side and then screw down at the other.  The 'universal' clip below has the mounts already snapped in appropriately for our Intel Core 2 Duo test bed.

My apologies for the quality of the pics below but I wanted to show you how this worked.  The universal retention clip is mounted with the cooler fit in under a hook on one side.  The protruding side with the screw pointing up then accepts the long side of the cooler's mounting arm and is screwed down tight with an extension nut shown below in pic three.  This system blows the hell out of the Intel OEM mounting system in a big big way.

One more shot to give you an idea of the collateral benefits of the Tt MaxOrb.  Check out the overhang.  Yes the fins are elevated to provide plenty of clearance but notice that air can now pass through the convection fins and over a sizeable amount of mainboard real estate.  This keeps good air flow in your system and doesn't let hot mainboard components create pockets of stagnant heat.

Under power the Tt MaxOrb give off a subtitle blue glow from LEDs mounting on the fan.  I'm glad to see that Thermaltake knows that less is more when it comes to extra lighting.

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